I can’t tell you how much I’m loving these first images of Rooney Mara dressed as her “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” character Lisbeth Salander in the new issue of W Magazine. I also can’t tell you how much I love the fact they opted to debut her look in a fashion magazine.

Something I’m a little less enthusiastic about are the changes they’ve made to the source material:

The script, which captures the novel’s bleak tone (its original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women), was written by Academy Award winner Steven Zaillian, who wrote Schindler’s List, and it departs rather dramatically from the book. Blomkvist is less promiscuous, Salander is more aggressive, and, most notably, the ending—the resolution of the drama—has been completely changed. This may be sacrilege to some, but Zaillian has improved on Larsson—the script’s ending is more interesting.

However, I have come to trust director David Fincher so implicitly since he’s created many of my all time favorite movies (“Seven,” “the Game,” “Fight Club,” “Zodiac,” “Benjamin Button” and, now, “The Social Network”) that I believe any tweaks he made to the plot or characters will only elevate the final product. A film that promises to be as graphic as the book, judging from talk of the casting process — an ordeal that sounds like hell!

“It was hard,” Fincher says. “We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene. The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. That’s Salander’s big scene, and we had to see if they could do it.”

And while it was essential, it wasn’t something Rooney was prepared for. “David added the rape scene at the last minute, and I said, ‘Ohmigod! They must be really serious.’ They did one test, then another a week later. They shot me in the subway in L.A. in full hair and makeup with a motorcycle. Every day they had a new request. On a Monday morning, David called me in, and I said, ‘What do you want me to do to my hair now?’ I was at the end of my rope. He told me I had the part. I hadn’t even read the script yet.”